Now that you've done the easy part of adding the foundational content to your resume, let’s tackle the meat of the resume: your work experience section. The bullet point descriptions of your work experience are critical to get right.

Writing Resume Bullet Points ✍️

We’re going to do something a little bit different here. Don’t start by trying to write bullet points in your resume itself. Close the resume template with all the good info that you’ve populated. Really, close it.

You want to spend ample time upfront using your brain and really thinking about what stories you want to tell. This is much more effective, especially for anything you worked on more than a couple of months ago. Otherwise, you’ll start to feel like you’re banging your head against your resume.

What we’ll be doing here is 3 simple steps:

• Brainstorm. First, a brainstorming exercise to figure out what stories you want to tell.

• Bullet. Generating a master list of bullet points that describe your professional achievements. 

• Copy-Paste. Finally, whipping back out your resume and pasting in the beset bullets you came up with

This approach works well because: 

• It pushes you to think broadly about your whole experience and the stories you want to tell during your interviews

• It makes it so much easier to have multiple versions of your resume down the line

Again, our overall goal is to make it easy for the reader to quickly understand who you are, what you offer, and the positive impact you’ve had professionally.

Brainstorm 🧠

Let’s start with a brainstorm. Jog your memory about what you actually did at your last few employers. This includes the projects you’ve worked on, successes you’ve contributed to, and responsibilities you’ve owned. 

Begin with your most recent job because this will be the easiest role to remember and help you hit the ground running. Imagine talking to a friend or an old colleague. Get your thoughts out quickly. Don’t think about wordsmithing, formatting, or relevance. 

For each role you've had, answer these questions::

• What are/were my main objectives?

• What projects most prepared me for the job I want?

• What professional achievements am I proud of?

• When's a time I took initiative?

• Whom did I influence? How?

• What are the biggest impacts I made? What did I accomplish?

• Did I help the company grow?

• Did I drive revenue? 

• Did I reduce costs?

• Did I improve profits?

• Did I attract customers?

• Did I make the customer experience better?

• Did I make the employee experience better?

• Did I streamline a process?

• What metrics were impacted by my work?

• What are the lasting impacts of my work?